Chasing the Polka Dot Jersey

The Tour de Goose gives runners a taste of France

On a summer evening in Portland, Oregon, 30 runners warm up at a high school track. Ranging in ability from a former Olympian to middle-of-the-pack age-groupers, they are there for the first-ever running of the "Guillotine Mile," hosted by Portland’s Red Lizard running club as part of a French-themed series called the Tour de Goose.

The Tour is the brainchild of David Hatfield, a runner and bicycle racing fan. Patterned on cycling’s Tour de France, it is comprised of six stages stretching over 21 days, more-or-less coinciding with Lance Armstrong’s latest bid for victory. "Most running events are just a single race," Hatfield says, "but there’s more drama in bicycle racing because you don’t know who’s going to win any given stage. We added various gimmicks to make the running less predictable."

Anther difference: Tour de Goose participants don’t vie for the traditional maillot juene given to the overall leader. They are after a lesser-known prize: the polka-dotted jersey. In the Tour de France, the yellow jersey goes to the fastest overall. Polka-dots go to the best hill-climber.

While the Guillotine Mile is flat, the other five stages are more than hilly enough to compensate. Men’s and women’s jerseys are specially made for the occasion, and each week’s leaders have to fight hard to retain them in subsequent stages.

Trying to win or retain the jerseys from stage to stage adds yet another element to the Tour, reminiscent of the children’s game "king of the mountain." In fact, the Tour de France polka-dot jersey winner is dubbed precisely that: King of the Mountains.

Stage one The Tour de Goose is in its third year, but this year’s stage one, the Guillotine Mile, is new. Everyone, fast or not, is struggling to understand the rules.

The race is essentially an exercise in brinksmanship. During registration, runners are asked to predict their finishing times. But the Guillotine Mile isn’t a normal prediction race, where you try to match your predicted time exactly and the one who finishes closest wins. If you promise a 6:00 but deliver a 5:30, you get credit for the 6:00. If you are even a split second slow, however, the guillotine drops and you get "chopped"—equivalent to not finishing at all.

The result is that everyone has been sizing up the competition, trying to figure out how risky a prediction to make. In my own 50+ division, there are plenty of people who can beat me, but none is present. In most of the Tour, series points are awarded based on overall position, but for this stage, they’re based on age-group standing. I’m nursing a sore foot, so if I can win my division at a fast jog, I’ll save the foot for later.

Shortly before the start, Hatfield calls the runners to gather round. "OK," he says, "here’s how it stands. In the women’s under-30 division, Erin says she’s doing a 6:00. C’mon, Erin, you’re faster than that! In the women’s 30–39, Mandy says 5:55 and Angela’s going for 5:45. Julz, you’re down for another 6:00. Anybody want to change their prediction? Julz, do you realize that if nobody gets chopped, you can’t do any better than third?"

"OK," Julz says, "put me down for 5:45."

"And what about you, Jeff? Are you going to let Lovett get away with that ridiculous time?"

Jeff and I look at each other. "Yes," he says, and I breathe a sigh of relief. He doesn’t know about the foot.

As we move through the divisions, the whole thing begins to sound more like a game of bridge than running, with about a third of the runners ratcheting up their bids to meet the competition. Most would regret it.

Then it’s time to start. Hatfield has recruited a starter, who has a clock, counting backward to zero. Hatfield himself is running, having bid a time one second faster than a national-class mile for his age group.

The protocol is simple: You start when the clock reaches the time you’ve bid. A three-foot guillotine stands at the finish, where a volunteer will yank the rope when the clock reaches zero. When the blade thunks down, the race is over.

As it turns out, there is a large pack of runners, including Hatfield and Julz, about 10 meters from the finish when that happens. For the rest of the Tour, they will be trying to make up for scoring zero points on the first stage, while those who were more conservative fight to hold their windfall leads.

Even Dudman, one of the main contenders for the series title, admits that luck played a role. "I said I’d run 4:50," he says, "but I’ve run so many predicts I nearly forgot it was a time I had to beat, not match."

Stage Two introduces runners to The Goose.

For people who have never encountered it before, it’s a shock—a monstrous hill with grades of up to 12 percent. Technically, there is no Goose Hill. Rather, there is a neighborhood (and pub) known as Goose Hollow, at the base of Portland’s 1,000-foot West Hills. But to the Red Lizards, The Goose is the hill, which they’ve been climbing every Thursday for years. The trek to the top is the club’s signature training run.

The full route climbs 1,000 feet in 3.5 miles, but unguarded road crossings confine the Tour to the first two-thirds of that, a climb of about 600 feet on a mix of roads, trails, and even a few flights of steps. A few years ago, Hatfield noted that most people do it in about 90 percent of the time it takes them for a flat 5K—an observation that would play a major role in his development of the Tour.

Stage Two is a straightforward dash to the top. Some of Portland’s best runners have tried it, and nobody has gotten below 13:19. This year Dudman is in the top three, while Erin grabs the women’s jersey by knocking several seconds off Mandy’s course record.

My age-group win at the Guillotine Mile means that I start this stage among the series leaders, but this time scoring isn’t based on age groups and I merely wind up as top geezer, a category I artificially define as older than Dudman. Also ahead of me is a 40-year-old Australian nicknamed the Tasmanian Devil because he was once state champion of Tasmania and owns a formidable 1:03 half-marathon PR.

Stage Three is the one I’ve been waiting for—the Handicapper. As with the Guillotine Mile, the slower runners get a head start. But this time, there’s no bidding for start times: Hatfield sets them based on runners’ 5K times.

"The formula is complicated," he says, "but the idea is to see who is the best hill climber relative to their speed on the flat. So I ask for everybody’s best recent 5K time, though I can convert from other distances, if necessary. I also look at what they did on Stage Two." The latter, he says, is to correct a mistake in the Tour’s first year, when a too-simple formula gave 10-minute milers an insurmountable lead if they also happened to be decent hill-climbers.

When possible, Hatfield does a reality check on claimed 5K times, but ultimately the handicapping is based on the honor system. "Afterward, we have a mob trial and give the Sandbagger’s Award," he says. "People know who deserves it."

Years of hill running, bicycling and backpacking have given me the ability to run hills with people who are simply disappearing specks on the flat. With the top in sight, I am in third or fourth, but in the last 20 meters, the Tasmanian Devil blows by and one of the young elites nearly nips me but the finish appears in the nick of time.

Within a minute, most of the rest of the field arrives. Hatfield’s handicapping has become very good indeed.

Stage Four comes a few minutes later at Vista Road, a residential street about a half-mile from Goose Hollow.

Any road named Vista must involve a hill. This one is short but sweet, and because we happen to be running on French Independence Day, Hatfield has dubbed the sprint to the top "The Storming of the Bastille."

Only the top three male and female finishers can score more than nominal series points in this stage, and I am a no-hoper: When the Good Lord handed out fast-twitch, I must have been off on a long, slow run.

So I jog the men’s race, then join the crowd lining the course, Tour-de-France-style, to cheer on the women as my track partner, a woman named Janne who I know to have a punishing kick, deals Erin and Mandy a surprise upset.

Stage Five is a team race.

Teams are a major feature of bicycle racing. In the Tour de Goose, they are comprised of three to six runners and figure in the scoring in two ways. First, there is an overall team competition, in which scores are calculated by adding up the point totals of each team’s best man, best woman, and next-best runner of either gender. But there is also Stage Five, in which each team member receives the number of points scored by his or her team.

Each year the rules get more complex, to the point that even Hatfield has trouble remembering the details. "I think they’re still somewhere on the Red Lizard website," he says.

But the core of this event is yet another race up the big hill. Team finishing times are based on the arrival times of each team’s third runners, so long as one member of each gender has reached the summit. There is also a scavenger hunt with bonus points for finding small French-colored flags distributed along the course. One year, Hatfield also gave each team a stack of books that they had to get to the summit before they could score, with slower teams receiving fewer books.

Teams have been forming throughout the series, but it isn’t mandatory to affiliate until Stage Five, and, thanks the Guillotine Mile and the Handicapper, I am carrying enough points to be everyone’s favorite free agent. I team up with Dudman, Hatfield, and Janne, the fast female kicker in stage four. Hatfield isn’t running, however, because he knows the locations of the flags.

Our strategy is simple. Hatfield has divided the runners into three waves, slowest first. Unlike the Handicapper, nobody gets a large head start, just enough for each group to have a shot at finding flags—slower runners on the first portion of the course, mid-paced folks in the middle (after they’ve passed the slower runners), and fast runners at the end. Since Janne is our only woman, we tell her to concentrate on running, while the rest of us look for flags. It works; we take first place.

Stage Six is another mile, this one downhill, on a road. It is held in "pursuit" form, which is the reverse of a handicap race because the highest-ranking runners start first.

It is another idea that was simple in concept, complex in execution. Hatfield has decided to score the mile so that each second of speed represents one-fifth of a point in the final standings. Then he starts the leaders first, with five-second intervals for each point difference in the standings. Thus, a runner who has accumulated 134 points in the first five stages will start 25 seconds behind one with 139 points. The result? Anyone you pass, you beat.

The course plunges 200 feet through a series of S-curves. Hatfield huddles with his laptop while the rest of us jog to the start. En route, Erin and I discuss strategy. She has an upcoming road race and is trying to figure out what she might have to do now, to stay ahead of Mandy. I am worried about Mandy’s husband, the Tasmanian Devil. As it turns out, our teams have fared well enough to give Erin a 75-second head start and me 45 seconds—a clear victory for her, but not for me. There’s nothing to add wings to your heels like having world-class speed bearing down from behind, however. Aided by that and the downgrade, I run my fastest mile in 25 years, then join the others for a companionable jog back to Goose Hollow and a barbeque.

Hatfield sees the whole thing as a model for how other clubs might liven up their weekly runs. "The Tour draws a lot of people to our training run," he says. "More than 50 took part in one or more stages. It isn’t terribly serious—just good-natured competition, made more interesting by trying to follow the Tour de France."

"It’s fantastic," adds Bob Williams, a coach who sometimes refers runners to the group. "I really like the way it makes you think as well as run. And it shows that the Lizards are a club who know how to have fun."

"That’s the idea," says Hatfield. Though he does have one piece of advice for race directors attempting their own summer series: "Keep it simple." Not that he’s shown any sign of heeding his own advice. If there’s one thing the Tour has shown, it’s that the more complex it gets, the more people love it.

Team Red Lizard Running Club is a non-profit running club with members across the Northwest. The team works to promote the running & multi-sport community, helps with the local special olympics and other volunteer events and promotes French culture by running up hills.